“When I first came to Sun Microsystems in 1996, I came because I wanted to do OS development,” says Solaris developer Bryan Cantrill, adding that at that time most other OS vendors had already given up the race to Microsoft. “There was only one vendor whose Windows NT strategy was to beat NT, and that was Sun.”

As luck would have it, that strategy worked. Solaris emerged from the Unix wars victorious and gave Microsoft a beating in the server market to boot, only to be eclipsed by a dark horse contender from the world of open source. Today the Linux buzz continues unabated, but Sun plans to keep innovating.

I’m not sure it was "lucky" but I suppose there’s room for alternate opinions. And, yes, we plan to keep innovating. Like with OpenSolaris. We can’t forget that part …